I met the authors of this book during the 2016 edition of Elektor’s Fast Forward Award event at the electronica trade show Munich.  There, Michael Shustov and his son Andrey Shustov proudly presented a new composite-component called the baristor for barrier-resistor. And sure enough their contribution was awarded with a prize for taking home to their native country: Russia. Barring the odd opamp, Messrs Shustov’s designs invariably include 1970’s/80’s/90’s components of the dead common type besides some rarer ones, but always discrete parts of the kind you can still grab by two or three leads.  Having heard the baristor discussed in Munich back in 2016 I was curious to see how these obvious fans of let’s say old school electronic parts fared in a book publication.
And indeed the "new" component is discussed at length in Electronic Circuits For All.
elektor


400

Some of the simpler circuits I saw in the book could have been redraws from Rudolf F. Graf’s Encyclopedia of Electronics or Elektor’s 30x Circuits books. It’s nice to think though that this is the “Russian” way of doing a compilation of 400+ simple electronic circuits when Graf admittedly is extremely American and Elektor, extremely European in his/their approach.

All circuits in the book look minimalist and seem to lack a certain refinement in terms of perfection tweaks like decoupling capacitors, tolerance indicators, grounded unused CMOS gates, and stopper resistors to mention a few of my personal favourites. Fortunately all circuits are printed large enough to be clearly legible.

So much for the first thing e-engineers do when they pick up a book: check out the circuits! The more the better! Are they any good?

Struggling with the words

The language used in the book to describe the operation of the circuits and components is odd in places, and reveals interference with German. Many sentences are comprehensible only if you have the ability to distil the correct English words and so get at what the authors want to get across. For example, the term